Oz spies have reached across the Indian Ocean and meddled with the cooling controls of an unnamed Middle Eastern nation's servers hostile to Australia, according to reports.
The Australian Financial Review offered scant detail on the attack that was based on multiple intelligence sources.
The report claims the Australian …

A group of China-based cyber spies have begun targeting national security think tanks, initially targeting analysts focusing on the Asia-Pacific region before switching their focus to Iraq.
Infosec threat intelligence firm CrowdStrike warns that a group it dubs Deep Panda has begun targeting think tanks, particularly those …

Israeli spies are alleged to have snooped on John Kerry’s phone calls during recent Middle East peace talks.
The IDF tapped the US Secretary of State's unencrypted calls while trying to broker a ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Der Spiegel reports sources as saying.
Kerry used both encrypted and open …

A team of attackers tagged by Kaspersky as the first "advanced Arab hackers" has passed around malware targeting Middle East governments, the military and others.
So far 100 malware samples attributed to the group have been tagged, the hacker branding consultancy claims.
Kaspersky Labs researchers revealed the attacks at the …

Researchers at Toronto-based Citizen Lab have shot down denials by Syria, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates regarding attacks against activists, journalists and dissidents, labelling some of the assaults as incompetent.
The team gathered tens of thousands of documents and files detailing the malware and social engineering …

Among the vast haul of information lifted from secret networks by former US intelligence sysadmin Edward Snowden are details of a top-secret British spy base placed in the Middle East to tap into undersea communications cables and eavesdrop on the region's internet, it has been reported.
According to the Independent, the …

Roaming in the Middle East should get easier as local mobile operator Zain will carry Vodafone's traffic and sport Voda's brand across the region.
Travellers taking in the sights and sounds of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq can access Vodafone's services, as part of a deal between the two companies to carry each …

Hoping to get a bigger slice of the server racket in the Middle East and Africa – you know, the part of EMEA that is still showing some signs of life – Cisco Systems has tapped The Cash to peddle its Unified Computing System blade and rack servers.
The Cash, of course, refers to National Cash Register, the provider of ATM, point …

Exclusive
Above-top-secret details of Britain’s covert surveillance programme - including the location of a clandestine British base tapping undersea cables in the Middle East - have so far remained secret, despite being leaked by fugitive NSA sysadmin Edward Snowden. Government pressure has meant that some media organisations, despite …

Research In Motion co-CEO Mike Lazaridis has terminated an interview with the BBC's Click programme when questioned about Blackberry security in the Middle East.
The Blackberry boss was happy enough to talk up the company's new Playbook tablet machine. However, when asked about pressure from regimes to help wiretap Blackberry …

Security firms are investigating what looks to be another piece of state-sponsored malware, which has been targeting banks in the Middle East and distributing an unknown payload.
Dubbed Gauss by Kaspersky Labs, the malware first seemed to be a module of the highly sophisticated Flame virus but has now been recognized as a …

A new super-cyberweapon targeting countries like Iran and Israel that has been knocking around in computers for two years has been discovered by researchers.
"Flame", a highly sophisticated piece of malware, was unearthed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and Kaspersky Lab, which said it was more complex and …

Exclusive
More pieces of HP’s management puzzle are being slotted into place at a country and regional level, ahead of the major split in the corporation planned for October.
As world + dog knows, the PC and print businesses are to separate from the rest of the organisation to create HP Inc, with all other divisions falling under Hewlett …

Boffins in Germany have extracted the oldest human DNA yet discovered – from a 45,000-year-old thigh bone found in Siberia.
And after studying the genetic goop, the researchers have concluded that humans started interbreeding with their Neanderthal cousins about 60,000 years ago.
45,000 year old human bone 'What a slut'
A …

Apple is planning to build the world's biggest iStore in Dubai - marking the first time it has opened a retail store in the Middle East.
The fruity firm is looking for 26 categories of iToilers to work in the United Arab Emirates. Some 13 of these positions are for jobs in the new store.
Cupertino wants to recruit everything …

Ericsson's flat sales last year were the result of its disappointing fourth quarter, especially in America, its latest financial results show.
The Swedish company is still the biggest supplier of mobile network infrastructure in the world, and in the fourth quarter it saw strong sales growth in the Middle East, Asia and Europe …

The Middle East-based Molerats hacker crew are even more active than first suspected, according to a report by researchers who claim the team has launched attacks against an unnamed US financial institution and multiple European governments.
FireEye said it had identified the expanded list of targets after putting the command- …

HP has revealed who'll be sitting where once the splitting song stops and the company has broken into HP Inc. and HP Enterprise.
As previously flagged, current leader Meg Whitman will stay atop HP Enterprise as chair and CEO, backed by the following team:
Cathie Lesjak will be the Chief Financial Officer
John Schultz will be …

Tech Data, the world's second biggest technology distributor, is withdrawing from the Middle East with Aptec stepping in to fill the hole left in the region.
In a filing made to the Securities and Exchange Commission Tech Data said that it expects to see a loss of up to $7m for the first half of fiscal 2008 because of the …

Facebook's servers fell over today – with users on the US east coast, and in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, complaining of outages.
Facebook outage map
Oh noes! Circles mark areas of connectivity problems ... Click for bigger map. Source: IsItDownRightNow.com
According to IsItDownRightNow.com, the downtime appears to …

CoTW
Happy New Year, one and all. This post-festive edition of Comment of the Week will gently drop you back into the simmering gloop of El Reg's commentardery, slicing and dicing the merely-bad along with the very worst of the below-the-line offerings. Cheers!
Over the Christmas season our motoring correspondent Simon Rockman took a …

Apple's FaceTime enables any iPhone 4 to make video calls to any other iPhone 4, assuming neither of them were bought in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Egypt or Jordan.
FaceTime was hyped by Steve Jobs as the application that would turn the world on to video calling, and Apple web sites proudly listed it as a key feature of the …

Oracle could have saved mountains of cash and bad press if Click-to-Play was enabled before Java was hosed by an armada of zero day vulnerabilities, Adobe security boss Brad Arkin says.
The simple fix introduced into browsers over the last year stopped the then zero day blitzkrieg in its tracks by forcing users to click a button …

A new analysis of the Antikythera Mechanism, the intriguing meshed gears device hauled from the Aegean in 1900, suggests it may be of Babylonian origin.
The Mechanism is engraved in Greek and is widely thought to have been able to track the cycle of the Moon and of both Solar and Lunar eclipses, among other natural phenomena. …

Jimmy Wales is set to co-chair the annual World Economic Forum on the Middle East, an event billed as "the foremost global gathering of political, business and cultural leaders."
The Wikipedia co-founder will chair the event alongside Khalid Abdulla-Janahi, chairman of Bahrain's Ithmaar Bank; Mohammed Alshaya, executive chairman …

Privacy laws covering the use of personally-identifiable information are, on a global scale, creating a dizzying patchwork of cookie-cutter cookie-serving companies created to sniff our Web browsing.
That's one conclusion of research led by Marjan Falahrastegar at Queen Mary University, London. The group, which included …

Channels Forum 2014
The IT industry has pulled back from the brink of disaster but conflicts in Russia and the Middle East have the potential to push it back to the edge, resellers and distributors were warned today.
Kicking off the Channels Forum conference in Cannes, Canalys CEO Steve Brazier declared the victory of the channel, the revival of …

It was more bad news for Samsung in the third quarter of 2014, as the Korean smartphone maker saw its global market share shrink by nearly 8 per cent, year on year, with most of it going to Chinese rivals.
According to the latest figures from Gartner, Samsung remains the worldwide smartphone king, but its market share was just …

Pics
Another month, another successful SpaceX launch. This time, a Falcon 9 sent into orbit a twin set of communications satellites that eschew chemical-engine propellant in favor of solar power.
Typically, half the weight of a satellite is its propulsion fuel, used to maneuver it into position once in space.
However, the two just- …

Microsoft has reaffirmed its commitment to the absolute bottom of the mobile market with a new, web-capable phone that will retail for just $29.
In a blog post announcing the device on Monday, Microsoft described the Nokia 215 as its "most affordable internet-ready phone" – but that doesn't make it a smartphone.
If you recall, …

Updated
After Friday prayers at the Al-Jafali mosque in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah, Raif Badawi will receive the first 50 lashes of his 1,000 stroke sentence for the crime of publishing blasphemy against Islam on Facebook.
In May, Badawi, a father of three, was sentenced to five years in prison, and will receive 1,000 lashes to be …

A submarine cable in the Mediterranean was cut earlier today, resulting in a dramatic slowdown in internet access for people in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and much of the Middle East.
A spokesman for Flag Telecom, the owner of the severed cable, told the Reg: "It is a problem off the coast of Alexandria in Egypt. For some reason …

Customers dependent on Salesforce were kicked offline on Friday morning as Marc Benioff’s cloud went titsup.
Sales and marketing teams were left looking at an early start to the weekend as their CRM-as-a-service checked out.
The blank screens seemed to be the result of a problem in two of the company’s instances serving EMEA …

Career spook Alex Younger has been named as the new head of MI6, replacing Sir John Sawers.
Before taking up his position as boss of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), which is more widely known as MI6, Younger oversaw its global operations. After joining in 1991, he was posted to Europe and the Middle East, before becoming …

A boffinry brawl is taking place over the origin of the domesticated dog, with a new study suggesting that man's best friend came from Europe, not from the Middle East or East Asia as previously thought.
Wolves
Researchers led by Olaf Thalmann of the University of Turku in Finland used prehistoric genomes to come to the …

A surge in the relative value of the dollar has caused resident mystics at Gartner to dramatically lower global tech spending forecasts by billions of dollars.
The crystal ball stroker estimates $3.73 trillion will be splashed on IT during in 2015, and if correct this equates to percentage growth of 2.4, way down on the 3.9 per …

Spammers are using loop holes in the internet routing registry to commandeer address space and pump out junk mail, and potentially launch denial of service attacks and steal traffic.
As explained by cyber crime reporter Brian Krebs and Cisco researcher Jaeson Schultz, IP addresses can be snatched by scammers who establish bogus …

NEC and Alcatel-Lucent are to divvy up the planned Sea-Me-We 5 submarine cable build. The cable's consortium has awarded hundreds of millions of dollars worth of build contracts for the anticipated 2016 switch-on.
The new 20,000-km cable is planned to run from Singapore to France via the Middle East, and will have a design …

It's been a case of one step forward and two steps back for Raif Badawi, the Saudi man facing 10 years in prison, and 1,000 lashes, for posting that he was an atheist and supporter of women's rights on Facebook and running a web forum for liberal Saudis.
Last Friday, Badawi received the first 50 of his 1,000-lash sentence in …

Finland's Nokia says it is shutting down its massive mobile phone factory in Chennai, India, now that Microsoft has terminated its manufacturing contract with the firm.
The Chennai facility has had a troubled history, owing to a protracted tax dispute with the Indian government that led authorities to freeze its assets.
Nokia's …

According to the latest drop of leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the US spy agency provides financial assistance, weapons and signals intelligence to Israel.
The Intercept reports that Canadian, British and Jordanian signals intelligence is also shared with Israel. This intelligence relates to Palestinian targets, …

Lufthansa has announced that it’s about to sell off its IT infrastructure division to IBM and rent IT services from Big Blue in an outsourcing partnership.
The German airline has been restructuring itself in an effort to cut costs and said earlier this year that it was looking for a buyer for its IT biz so it could better …

+Comment
Richard Yu, the head of Huawei's consumer business group, has said that he sees an Android future for the company.
The Chinese company has huge global ambitions to capitalise on its standing as a major infrastructure supplier and to become a consumer brand and is particularly looking to The Middle East and Africa.
It’s a policy …

Falling sales at BT's global services division has forced the company to make a bold shift in its strategy in that part of the business by expanding its investments abroad.
The telecoms giant said today that it planned to "accelerate growth" in Asia Pacific, the Middle East and Africa.
It's one of Gavin Patterson's first big …

It is a strange world when the EMEA* organisation of a business boasts about meteoric growth and then parts with the boss of that region – but this is exactly what Pure Storage has done.
The flash storage business has waved bye-bye to industry vet Steven Rose, who less than a year ago joined as veep and is now looking for his …

Fujitsu’s technology products group lead Michael Keegan is moving up in the world, taking over as head of the UK and Ireland from Duncan Tait.
The company said in March that UK veep Tait was being given the top role in EMEIA as it shuffled its global hierarchy in a reorganisation that led to the resignations of nine senior execs …

The much-used channel phrase ‘revenue is vanity and profit is sanity’ could easily be applied to mid-market reseller hulk SCC as it opened up on results for the first half of fiscal 2015.
From its Midlands HQ, the Rigby clan’s last technology business turned over £729m at group level in the six months to the end of September, …

Fujitsu company veteran Tom Roche has grabbed the chieftain's chair at the Technology Solutions unit with a specific brief to boost security sales.
The post became vacant last month when former boss Michael Keegan was made overlord of UK ops for Fujitsu, replacing Duncan Tait who was lifted to the head of the EMEIA organisation …